Head: (5 of 5)
Heart: (3 of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (4 of 5)

What if Martin Luther King had given an “I have a nightmare” speech instead of “I have a dream” ask the authors of Break Through? In fact, King did begin a “nightmare” speech focusing on debt and victimhood, urgency and rude awakenings—“perhaps the darkest and most discouraged speech King ever gave”—before Mahalia Jackson spoke up and encouraged him to talk instead about his dream. After a brief pause to regroup his thoughts, King shifted metaphors and began again: “let us not wallow in the valley of despair…even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”

It is this shift from a negative focus on blame and problems to a mindset of imagination and possibility, claim authors Nordhaus and Shellenberger, which empowered a successful social movement; within two years, Congress passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. The authors go on to present an intricate intellectual argument claiming that movements and leaders who neglect to inspire and focus on what is good about humanity and society ultimately fail to make the widespread changes that their guilt-inducing lectures and admonitions try so hard to make.

Forgetting the power of positive rhetoric to appeal to the compassionate, creative side of human nature is why the civil rights, feminist, labor and environmental movements of the second half of the 20^th century have since devolved into whiney, complaint-based single-interest lobbies, they claim. These former environmentalists place their own field under the most intense scrutiny, chiding it for creating a false separation of man from nature; for forgetting that the security that comes from meeting basic material needs is what engenders compassion and concern for others, including non-humans; and for using such negative verbiage as “stop, cease and desist, restrict, reverse, prevent, regulate, control and constrain.”

Comparing the general public’s low participation in environmental activism and limited amount of giving to environmental causes to the growing fervent involvement of middle class Americans in evangelical religious groups, they ask, it is any wonder that the political right has mobilized networks of pre-political, formal and informal church-based social networks for its family- values platform? The key to success, the authors say, is to capitalize on early 20^th century psychologist Abraham Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. Once most members of a society have met their base material needs for food, shelter and security, they start generating “higher” needs of self-esteem, belonging and status, which evangelical leaders have learned to tap brilliantly while environmental groups, with their elitism and once-a-year-mailings, do not.

Once people feel like they belong to a group of friends or “tribe”—essential after the breakdown of tight family units and widespread cross-country mobility—they seek an even higher sense of purpose, self-creation and deep fulfillment. “Nobody creates his life’s purpose in a vacuum,” Nordhaus and Shellenberger say. “The stories we tell about our lives, and the purposes we attach to our behaviors, are crucial to creating happiness….It is hard to imagine creating a politics powerful enough to transform the global energy economy that is not fundamentally grounded in peoples lives. A bright new agenda backed by good science, effective marketing, and savvy lobbying will simply not be enough.”

What will work to effect broad change is to build upon these higher needs for association, community, and fulfilling one’s creative potential via relative self-autonomy. Regardless of a leader’s politics or thoughts on environmental causes, these tenets ring as true to leading an organization as to engendering a social movement. Continuing to shift management practices from those based on the top-down rigid hierarchies that were necessary to preserve orderly production in the industrial age to the more flexible, “virtual” management of today’s smaller, nimbler knowledge-based organizations will be crucial, as well as setting workers free to follow their creative drive.

The book is divided into two parts: The Politics of Limits, and the Politics of Possibility. The first part presents a social history of environmentalism from its birth to what the authors consider to be its demise. The second part is structured like Maslow’s pyramid, with chapters on status and security, belonging and fulfillment, pragmatism, and aspiring to greatness.